The Last Town on Earth

Ain’t nothing a man has can’t be taken away. Damnedest truth there ever was. All that one has could vanish—whether in an instant, with frightening speed, or across a lifetime, with decay so slow no eye could detect it. But with Graham it had come as quick as a breathe, and he would never, ever let that happen again.

He had so much to protect. He thought of his wife and daughter, the warm weight of the baby in his arms. The way she slept so peacefully, it was as though all the strife that had preceded her birth had abruptly and forever ceased to exist.

He had never known what he wanted until that day on Puget Sound, with the sun reflecting off the waves and the mountains hovering like benevolent spirits in the background. He was twenty-three then, six years after he’d left home when a fight with his father had gotten out of hand. He’d been riding the rails for years, had picked fruit in California and seen the bowels of the earth in the Montana mines, had been beaten up by railroad bulls who thought he was at worst a Wobbly or at best another bum come to ruin their towns.

Not long after leaving his family in Kansas, he’d fallen in with a friendly bunch who taught him how to bum rides on the train, how to avoid the railroad bulls and the town cops, how to find out where the next job was and how to get there. Taught him which job sharks you could trust and which would only take your money and then drive you to some godforsaken field where there was no job at all, just a handful of other bindle stiffs who’d been shaken down. Taught him how to hide your money when you slept on a train car, how to protect yourself in a flophouse, how to keep the bedbugs from getting to those places you really didn’t want them. After only a couple years, it was as if Graham had been doing this all his life, and soon he was the one teaching the younger runaways and roustabouts, showing them how to survive, how to take the punches and keep on walking, grinning all the while.

But the romance wore off fast, as the bosses got meaner, the pay got lousier, and the food at the work camps got worse. Graham remembered the time he ran out of Spokane after a strike got ugly, remembered sitting on the train as the sun was rising over the Sawtooth Mountains, the air bracingly cold and so clean. He remembered sitting there and taking in all the beauty that God had laid out before him and wondering just what he was supposed to be doing in it. Surely he had a purpose, a reason for existing in a place as maddeningly beautiful as this, but what? His life had been a series of responses and reactions, nothing more. He’d hear about a job and take it. He’d get some jack and spend it. A strike would hit the town and he’d leave. Somebody’d call him a name and he’d throw a punch.

Until Everett. The playground of second-tier timber barons who thought they were industrial magnates of the highest order, Everett was a quickly growing town with no shortage of jobs. Time had passed in an almost seasonless blur. After a year or so, Graham’s buddy Matt told him how he could make more if he worked in a shingle-weaving plant; Matt could put in a good word with the foreman and teach him how to do the work without losing a finger or two. Graham was desperate to create something completely his own, and saving some money would be exactly that. So he made the switch to sawyer, but it was harder work, in its way. Rather than living out in the woods beneath the persistent rains and leaning in to his end of a crosscut saw, Graham was hunched in a stuffy building manipulating pieces of wood through those terrifying machines. Some days he manned the tall gang saws whose vertical blades ingested fat logs and spat them out as perfect strips of wood, and other days he navigated the band saws, long winding strips of metal thin as ribbon but topped with steel teeth that cut the strips down further. Just keep those teeth away, he’d think, while inhaling all that sawdust and getting it in his eyes and squinting and wanting to rub them clean but resisting because one false move would mean—

Losing a finger. One day he’d been seized by a dust-induced coughing fit so violent that his left arm flew out where he knew damn well not to let it go, and when his hand came back, it had only three fingers and the thumb. It wasn’t even his—it was someone else’s, some odd misshapen thing, the last knuckle looking so weirdly prominent. And then the knuckle spurted an explosion of red like some Cascade volcano erupting to hideous life, and the red ran down the rest of the hand and he finally recognized it—good Lord, that is my hand, and there ain’t no pinkie.

The man next to him, who should have been concentrating on his own work and was lucky he didn’t lose any fingers of his own, looked up and shouted something Graham didn’t hear. Matt came over from his usual station, wrapped a rag around Graham’s hand, and took him to see the doctor. Matt was saying things that Graham couldn’t hear—he’d shut down so that his body could concentrate on the feeling of shuddering pain, waves of pain, an entire hideous universe of pain that sucked itself thin and jammed itself into the tiny hole that his finger had left behind. The pain cut through his hand, his arm, it made his shoulder throb and his back ache. The doctor hit him with some morphine and finally he could think, could get beyond the strictly animal instincts to which his mind had become subordinated. He concentrated on breathing while the doc sewed him up and told him how to take care of the wound and what to expect from his new, three-fingered hand.

“This happens a lot, huh?” Graham had asked. It was the first thing he’d said since the finger flew off.

“To shingle weavers? Yeah.” The doc, an older guy who had sewn shut countless gaping knuckles, fidgeted with his glasses. “How long you been on the job?”

“Four months.”

The doc nodded. “Usually happens sooner than then. Law of averages catches up to you eventually.”

Graham didn’t know what the law of averages was, but he didn’t like how the doc was treating him as if the accident were something he deserved. Maybe it was just the morphine. Nothing seemed quite right, not the too-white pallor of the doc’s skin or the too-dark indigo of the midday sky beyond the windows or the lack of feeling beyond Graham’s left wrist.

The doc told Graham what he owed. It was roughly two weeks’ pay, which was more than he had. Graham stuttered a bit, but the doc had heard this before and cut him off. “How much can you pay at the end of the month?”

They worked out a deal, a payment plan on the finger Graham no longer had. With that settled, Graham bade the doctor good day and headed outside.

The doc’s house was on a paved road not far from the center of town, just a few blocks away from the rowdy saloons that had been the focal point of a town outcry a few years earlier, or so Graham had been told. What you need is a drink, Graham told himself, but he knew he needed to go back to the mill and explain himself. Find out how much pay he was going to be docked for leaving early.

“How’s your hand?” someone asked.

He turned around and found himself face-to-face with a woman whose stare could have knocked down a few trees; although she looked like she’d skipped one meal too many, she seemed huge in spirit. She had long soot-black hair that curled in the constant mists of Washington, and she wore a long skirt, a gray flannel shirt, and dark boots—a masculine outfit for a woman, particularly one as beautiful as she.

“How’s my hand?” Graham repeated her question, unsure how to respond. He lifted his arm a bit, as if to display the bandage. “It’s a little bit smaller than it was this morning.”

“They’ve been making you work faster lately, huh?”

“Guess so.”

She shook her head. “Miracle you still have nine fingers.”

They got to talking, Graham impressed with the fact that she had initiated a conversation with a man she didn’t know, a fairly bold thing for a woman to do. And he was glad she’d done it, giving him permission to study that face, to talk to a woman he didn’t have to pay, a woman who seemed to take some interest in him. It made him feel off balance, at first, but maybe that was just the morphine.

“You’re not a member, are you?” she asked. “You don’t have a red card?”

Graham held his tongue for a moment, the twin bodyguards of caution and self-preservation keeping him silent. He did not have a red card, but even the subject of Wobblies was so taboo that he was reluctant to discuss it with a stranger, albeit an attractive female one.

Turned out she was a Wobbly herself and had arrived in town only a few days ago from Chicago. There had been rumors of a planned general strike for a couple of weeks; the mill owners had announced pay cuts and the unions were not pleased. Graham knew all this but had been doing his best to ignore it. He hated the mill owners as much as anyone, he figured, but every time a strike flared up, he lost everything he had and eventually had to pull up stakes and move to a new job in a new state. He liked Everett—he liked the neighborhoods of family houses and the kids running around after school, he liked being a part of the armada of men heading to the mill in the morning as the sun rose before them, slowly illuminating the tops of the tall trees that loomed above every road, capping them with halos of light. This was a place where he could stay. He hadn’t worked out the math yet, but he figured with the higher pay he’d been getting as a shingle weaver, he might be able to save enough to get his own place. Maybe get married and start a family.

Graham said as much to his toothsome inquisitor, skipping the part about marriage.

“So you want to keep slaving away till you don’t have any fingers left?” she asked.

He looked at his right hand—then and henceforth known as his good hand—and extended his fingers. Then he looked her in the eye and said, “I just want to keep the other nine.”

She reached out and handed him a pamphlet. “If you change your mind, this tells you when we’re meeting next. Maybe we can help you hold on to what you’ve still got.” She smiled when she said that, for the first time.

“What’s your name?” he asked. She said it was Tamara. He told her his name and thanked her for the pamphlet, and she nodded and walked away, to someplace important, judging from the speed of her steps and the confidence of her stride.

It was worth losing a finger to meet her. He’d lose another one if that was what it took to see her again.

So it was neither political nor economic motives that inspired Graham to attend his first official meeting of the Industrial Workers of the World. As he sat in the crowd, listening to the speakers—some of whom were from Everett but many of whom were from Chicago and other distant locales, rebels imported from the sites of many a clash between worker and owner—he fixed his eyes mostly on Tamara, until she looked back at him and he switched his gaze to the floor, his cheeks reddening. It took a couple of minutes for him to work up the nerve to look at her again. Had he actually blushed? He was a man who had felled trees and even bigger men, and he was blushing because he had looked at some lady who dressed like a female logger? He put his left fist inside his other hand, massaging the knuckles.

He was nervous when he walked up to her afterward and told her he was buying that red card, and they talked more about the possibility of a general strike and what it might do to the town. He was nervous when he asked to walk her home; she declined because she’d come with friends, but thanked him just the same. And he was nervous at the next meeting when the situation pretty much repeated itself, except this time she accepted his invitation.

But strangely, Graham wasn’t nervous the first time he kissed her—on the cheek, after the third walk home—maybe because nerves know when something is right. He had finally figured out what it was he’d been running from, or running to.

Any hope for a normal courtship, however, was thwarted by the strike that commenced two weeks into Graham’s life as a nine-fingered man. And what a strike it was—nearly every mill in town halted, the saws stilled and the trees standing proud and tall as if perfectly confident that not another Douglas fir within the town’s borders would ever fall again. And all the men on the streets, men in lines, men holding signs, men shouting. And eventually men fighting: strikers fighting with scabs and with strikebreakers, strikers with no accent fighting strikers with thick accents, cops fighting strikers. Surrounding them.

Graham’s scant savings were near extinction when the violence escalated. Sheriff McRae had started hiring thugs who were friendly to the Commercial Club, the mill owners who wanted to see the strike broken and the outside agitators sent back from whence they’d come. Strikers like Graham soon learned which street corners to avoid after dark and how to steer clear of any man who wore a handkerchief tied around his forearm—the mark of McRae’s vigilantes, who wore them so the real cops would know who was who when fights broke out. Graham heard about how the cops were going to start arresting anyone who gave a public speech, which made him think of Tamara, who’d taken to doing exactly that.

“It ain’t worth it,” he told her. “They’ll arrest you, and then Lord only knows what they’ll do.” He almost added, I ain’t going to let no woman of mine be manhandled by a bunch of lousy cops, but he knew not to say that. She was only just barely “his woman,” and she was not the type who liked to think of it that way.

As he’d expected, she was defiant. “They can’t arrest me just for talking, and if they do, so be it.” She told him about her idol Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, the original Rebel Girl and doyenne of “the cause.” Gurley Flynn had been put in jail more times than you could count, Tamara said, but she never gave up the fight. Tamara proudly declared herself a rebel girl as well, so bring on the cops.

Graham had to admire her fire, but he wondered what this educated Chicago woman—she’d been in college when she first joined the Wobblies, she told him—really knew about anything. She talked a good talk, and she sure as hell never acted scared, but just to be sure, Graham tailed her to the street corner where she’d told him she’d give her speech that night. It was dark and anything but quiet—people were milling all around, chatter that exploded into laughter now and then but always highly charged—when the speeches finally started. First it was a hulking fellow with a thick beard and some accent Graham figured was Hungarian. After the fellow’s final fist-shaking exhortations, Tamara took to the pulpit.

She started telling them about a recent strike in New Jersey and how things had looked bleak but everyone had stuck together. They had refused to submit to a few men in back rooms who controlled everything, and so will we, she said. The applause was so loud that it almost completely shrouded the sound of McRae’s goons moving in from the edge of the street and swinging their unimpressed clubs. Then the applause was gone and all that could be heard were the sounds of fighting, of dropped bottles popping when they hit the ground, of bones breaking and feet stomping and kicking, voices shouting and crying and grunting in an ever-tightening mass of enraged humanity. Graham pushed some folks out of his way and headed for the makeshift stage, where he grabbed Tamara by the wrists and pulled her through the crowd. An arm with a handkerchief tied around it got pretty close to them, but Graham jabbed a fist into the man’s nose and the goon dropped back. In a few frantic seconds they’d escaped not only the melee but also the notice of the cops who were standing beyond the crowd, supposedly to arrest anyone who tried to escape.

“This happen in New Jersey, too?” Graham asked after they’d walked a couple of blocks, heading in the direction of the rooming house where she boarded.

“Probably.”

“Probably? You weren’t there?”

She looked away, embarrassed. “It was three years ago. I was only seventeen.”

“This by any chance your first strike?”

She answered with silence.

“Well, it ain’t mine, and not one of ‘em that I’ve been around has ended well.”

“Then you’ve been around the wrong ones.”

He laughed softly. “I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone as sure of herself as you are.”

She grabbed his hand, held it. “I wasn’t so sure of myself once the cops came. Thank you for coming to get me.”

This was an opportunity for him to say something romantic, to court her by telling her it would take more than a few cops to keep him from her. But he was unsure how she’d react, so he kept walking.

“We’ll win this,” she said. “I know it. The more people they arrest, the more we’ll send in.”

Graham nodded. He still wasn’t used to her penchant for using “we,” her constant and assured feeling of being part of some great and uplifting whole.

They were at the front door to the boardinghouse. The kindly old lady who owned it had no idea Tamara was involved with those awful Wobblies, and if she had, Tamara would have been out on the street in a minute. Nor would the old lady allow a man to visit one of her boarders in her rooms. Graham wondered if sometime he should propose walking Tamara back to his place instead, or if that would be too forward.

“You ever think about what’ll happen after the strike?” he asked.

“You mean if we win?”

“I mean either way.” He was trying to act nonchalant but finding it impossible.

She looked at him closely. He never studied anything—especially not her—like that. He’d only had to look at her once and he’d known all he needed to.

Then she smiled slightly, like she had the first time they’d met. “I wonder what it is you’re really asking me.”

He couldn’t help smiling back, either out of embarrassment or happiness or excitement, he wasn’t sure. “Does a rebel girl just follow the cause to the next strike? You off to Cheyenne or Coeur d’Alene or Walla Walla next?

“I haven’t thought that far ahead.” Still smiling.

“I used to be like that.”

“Then what?”

“I got smarter. And I met someone.”

She’d only let him kiss her on the cheek before, but that night she leaned toward him as if giving permission for more, to do what he’d been thinking about damn near constantly for days. They kissed for a longer time than was proper for two people standing beneath one of the few streetlights on that side of town. He held her and was amazed at how fragile she felt, despite the steel in her eyes and her voice and her posture. Despite his happiness, he thought how vulnerable she was. And how vulnerable he was, to have something in his life other than himself that he needed to worry about, and protect.

The violence got worse, and fast. The night after the cops dragged a group of strikers to secluded Beverly Park and beat them nearly to death, Tamara told Graham that the IWW office wanted to send her down to Seattle to meet with the local chapter and recruit more people to Everett. That sounded like a safer idea than wandering around the violent streets of Everett, and Graham invited himself along.

With some of his few remaining coins, he paid for ferry tickets. A mid-western boy who’d spent all his adult life in the mountain states, he’d rarely been on a boat, and he didn’t know how to swim. As a storm moved toward them, the chop of the waves increased. By the time they neared Seattle, the skies had opened and it was pouring—the Sound an infinity of liquid explosions—and the boat was pitching from side to side. The moment they got off, Graham let out a long, slow breath and tried to steady himself. He was not looking forward to the ride home.

Tamara, who had apparently been on many a boat, not only in Lake Michigan but also on the Atlantic, as she had family in Boston and New York, was good enough not to tease him. Instead she told him more about her family, how she was the youngest of five sisters and had twelve nieces and nephews with more surely on the way. She loved and missed her parents, but the cause was worth the physical distance between herself and her family. Graham had nodded to all this, secretly wondering if one day he would meet this lawyer father and warmhearted mother, this gaggle of sisters and brothers-in-law with their Chicago and New York accents, their starched shirts and fancy cigars.

This was what he wanted. Not necessarily the family and their unimaginable strangeness, but the comfort of sitting beside Tamara and knowing she wanted to be with him. He would create a haven for the two of them, carve a better existence out of the strange land he’d been wandering through, create a more beautiful and rewarding world than the one they’d known.

In Seattle the rain continued to pour down, the city as gray and forbidding as a medieval fortress. Some Wobblies met them at the docks and escorted them to a ratty office located between the shipyards and some paper mills. All day it was conversation and strategizing about cops and jails, lawyers who’d helped out at past strikes, and how many folks could be recruited from Seattle to come north. Graham tried to make himself helpful, but mostly he felt like a laborer transported to a factory unlike any he’d ever seen, a revolution factory.

At six o’clock Tamara told him they’d need to stay till tomorrow, that dozens of folks were being rounded up and they’d all head back to Everett the following afternoon. One of the Wobblies had a room they could use, Tamara said. A room.

The Wobbly, a thin redheaded guy named Sam, with a similarly redheaded wife, lived in a small place in the eastern part of town. They made supper for Graham and Tamara and talked about the labor situation in Seattle. All evening Graham couldn’t stop thinking about sharing a bedroom with Tamara. Then Sam announced they’d best be getting some shut-eye, as tomorrow promised to be a helluva day.

It was all so strange, Graham thought, the way he and Tamara headed to the room without having spoken at all about the fact that they would be spending the night in the same bed. They just proceeded as if this were the rightest thing in the world. And it felt that way. She held his hand as they walked into the room and as soon as he’d shut the door she was in his arms, the two of them kissing before his hand had released the doorknob. Graham was conscious of the fact that he was in a moment he would remember till his dying day, so with every breath he concentrated on making sure that his future memories of that night would be forever untainted.

He did not awaken the next morning with Tamara in his arms because she was already up and dressed. He was a deep sleeper, she told him with a smile, and it was time to get going. She kissed him before leaving the room so he could dress in privacy, and this strange feeling of familiarity despite unfamiliar circumstances thrilled him. Waking up with a woman in the room, a woman he’d fallen in love with. He hadn’t quite thought this possible, yet there he was.

In a few hours they were back at the docks, along with about four hundred new friends. The IWW had hoped for a couple thousand, but this was an impressive number nonetheless. Two steamboats were needed to get them to Everett, the Verona and the Calista. Tamara and Graham and the Wobbly ringleaders got on board the Verona, which departed first, and though Graham hadn’t been looking forward to being on a boat again, he was relieved to see the bright sun in a perfectly cloudless sky, the water laid out so flat before him it was like a Kansan field, the tiniest of ripples shifting in the wind like stalks of corn. The boat ride was smooth, though so packed with bodies that it seemed to rock slightly just from the Wobblies’ singing, which grew louder with each verse. The Verona cut through Puget Sound, and the Wobblies serenaded the surrounding islands with their battle cries, their hymns of brotherhood and triumph, their odes to fallen leaders, and their righteous calls for a future of unity and peace. In the distance Mount Rainier watched over them like a mildly disapproving God, or so it seemed to Graham. But soon it and the wharves and cranes of Seattle faded into the distance.